From the Abraham Lincoln radio studio at the George Washington Broadcast Center.

Yeah, Armstrong and Joe Getty.

The Armstrong and Getty show.

We went for two reasons. One, to bring Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, as I said at the time.

The second reason was to eliminate al-Qaeda's capacity to deal with more attacks in the United States from that territory.

We accomplished both of those objectives. Period.

Yeah, not all experts I'm listening to seem to agree with that second part.

Osama bin Laden is clearly dead.

I don't know about him being at the gates of hell. That's a for theologians to decide.

Mission accomplished.

But as I was reading an article yesterday from somebody I fully respect who's nonpartisan,

the Taliban is stronger than they've ever been. They're certainly stronger than they were when we landed there.

Now you get into the separating Taliban from al-Qaeda in your verbiage so that you can say certain things.

But nobody's completely sure to what extent the Taliban and al-Qaeda aren't practically one in the same.

Or at least working hand in hand. They certainly seem to be working in hand in hand.

Now the Trump administration said Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State said the Taliban is broken with al-Qaeda and given us promises.

Nobody in no analyst that I read seems to believe that.

But I think we just were looking for an excuse through a couple of presidencies to get out of there.

Yeah, they said they're done with al-Qaeda. So anyway, we're done.

As opposed to just like we've been saying for a long time, let's just level with us. We spent a long time there. We did what we could.

It's good enough. If al-Qaeda does anything, we'll bomb the hell out of them. I don't know what are you going to do.

The whole building democracies thing is failed again more or less.

...